Jo Clayton: Changer’s Moon

As if in answer to that his hand tightened on her thigh; he still slept but he held onto her so hard, there’d be bruises in her flesh when he woke. His hands were very strong. Short, broad man who’d never be thin, who was already regaining his comfortable rotundity with rest and Coyote’s food. She laid her hand over the one that was bruising her and felt the punishing grip loosen. Deceptive little man, far stronger and fit than he looks. Fast, stubborn, even quicker in mind than he was in body. Tired little fat man, gray hair, guileless face, bland stupid look when he wanted to put it on. She stroked the back of his hand and heard him sigh in his sleep, felt the grip loosen more. A snare and a delusion you are, my love. Mijloc didn’t appreciate you when they had you, won’t appreciate you when they get you back. She eased the hand off her thigh and set it on the sheet beside him. He didn’t wake but grew restless, turned over, his arm crooking across his eyes as if the brightening light bothered him, then he settled again into deep slow breathing, almost a snore. She slipped off the bed, kicked the discarded sleeping shift aside and began the loosening up moves that would prepare her for more strenuous exercising.

Poet-Warrior

She thought she was calm, resolute, but she couldn’t get the key in the keyhole. Her hand was shaking. Fool, she thought, oh god. She flattened her right hand against the wallboard, braced herself and tried again. The key slid in, turned. “That’s one.” Two locks to go. She took a deep breath, shook the keys along the ring. The Havingee special was easy enough to find, a burred cylinder, not flat like the others. She got it in, managed the left turn and started the right but for a moment she forgot the obligatory twitch and tried to force the key where it didn’t go.

Again she sucked in a breath, let it trickle out, then leaned her forehead against the door’s cracking paint, trembling as if someone had pulled the plug on her strength.

“You all right?” A quiet voice behind her, not threatening, but she whirled, heart thudding. “There something I could do?”

The young man from the apartment by the head of the stairs-he’d come down the hall to stand behind her. Only a boy, can’t be more than early twenties. He looked tired and worried, some of it about her. She remembered, or thought she did, that his friend worked as a male nurse and had a bad moment wondering if he’d seen the disease in her. But that was nonsense. Even she wouldn’t know about it if the photogram hadn’t shown lump shadows in her breast, if the probe hadn’t pronounced them malignant. She tried a tight smile, shook her head. “I was just remembering. When I was a little girl living on our farm in the house my great-grandfather built, we kept a butterknife by the back door. I learned to slip locks early.” She smiled again, more easily. “We locked that door when we went to town and opened it with that knife when we got back. No one’d even seen the key for fifty years. The farm was between a commune and a cult, you see, and no one ever bothered us.” She held up her key ring. “Triple locked,” she said. “Sometimes it gets me down.’

He nodded, seeming tired. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Well, anytime.”

She watched him go back to his apartment. He must have followed her up the stairs. She hadn’t noticed him, but she wasn’t in any state to notice anything that didn’t bite her. She twitched the key, finished its turns, dealt with the cheap lock the landlord had provided, pushed the door open and went inside, forgetting the boy before the door was shut behind her.

In the living room she snapped on the TV without thinking, turned to stare at it, startled by the sudden burst of sound, the flicker of shadow pictures across the screen. She reached out to click it off, then changed her mind and only turned the sound down until it was a meaningless burring that filled the emptiness of the room. She kicked off her shoes, walked around the room picking things up, putting them down, finally dumped the mail out of her purse. The power bill she hadn’t had the courage to open for three days now. A begging letter from the Altiran society, probably incensed about the PM’s newest attack on the parks. She sent them money whenever she could. Money. Her hand shook suddenly. She dropped the rest of the mail. A brown envelope slid from the table to the floor. A story. Rejected. One she thought she’d sold, they kept it six months, asked for and got revisions of several sections. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and fought for control. “Oh, god, where am I going to get the money?”

With a small impatient sound, she took her hands from her eyes and dropped onto the couch to stare blankly at the phantoms cavorting on the TV screen. After a minute she swung her feet up and stretched out on the lumpy cushions.

She wasn’t afraid, not the way her doctor thought. Jim wasn’t really good at passing on bad news. Cancer. Still a frightening word. Caught early, as he’d caught hers, no big problem. If she had the money for the operation. If she had the money. Jim wanted her in the hospital immediately, the sooner the better. Hospital. She closed her hands into fists and pressed them down on her betraying flesh. Money. She didn’t have it and could see no way of getting it.

Her independence, her comfortable solitude, these were hard won and fragile, all dependent on the health of her body. There was never enough money to squeeze out insurance premiums. Never enough money for anything extra. Not for a car, though public transit here was an unfunny joke. (Even if she could afford to buy the car, she couldn’t afford the rent on an offstreet lockup, and any car left on the street overnight was stripped or stolen by morning.) Not enough for vacation trips; those she did take were for background on books so she could write them off her taxes. But with all that, she liked her life in her shabby rooms, she needed the solitude. No lovers now, no one taking up her life and energy. And she didn’t miss that… that intrusion. She smiled. Her dearly unbeloved ex-husband would be shocked out of his shoes by the way she lived, then smugly pleased. He’d been pleased enough when she stopped alimony after only a year. Not that he’d ever paid it on time. She’d gotten sick of having to go see him when the rent came due. She started her first novel and got a job in the city welfare office, wearing and poorly paid, testing her idealism to the full, but she liked most of the other workers and she liked the idea of helping people even when they proved all too fallibly human.

The last time she saw Hrald, she sat across an office table from him and smiled into his handsome face-big blond man with even, white teeth and melting brown eyes that promised gentleness and understanding. They lied, oh how they did lie. Not trying very hard to conceal her contempt for him, she told him she wanted nothing at all from him, not now, not ever again. He was both pleased and irritated, pleased because he grudged her every cent since she was no longer endlessly promoting him to his friends and colleagues, irritated because he enjoyed making her beg for money as she’d had to beg during the marriage. While she was waiting for the papers, she studied him with a detached coolness she hadn’t been sure she could achieve, let alone maintain. How young I was when I first met him. Just out of college. There he was, this smiling handsome man on his way up, moving fast through his circumscribed world, expecting and getting the best that life could offer him, taking her to fine restaurants, to opening nights, to places she’d only read about, showing her a superficial good taste that impressed her then; she was too young and inexperienced to recognize how specious it was, a replica in plastic of hand-made elegance. It had taken her five years to learn how empty he was, to understand why he’d chosen to marry her, a girl with no money, no family, no connections, supporting herself on miserable shit jobs, yessir-nosir jobs, playing at writing, too ignorant about life to have anything to say. Control-he could control her and she couldn’t threaten him in anything he thought was important.